Anthropology and Archaeology: Year In Review 2007

Researchers presented findings on the origins of human bipedalism and described an early member of the gorilla clade. Archaeologists uncovered rings of post molds at Fort Ancient and identified a pre-Inca solar observatory. Other discoveries included a Viking hoard and early evidence of winemaking and beekeeping.

Anthropology

Key developments in 2007 in the field of physical anthropology included new evidence for contrasting hypotheses for the origins of human bipedalism. A research team from the United Kingdom proposed a revisionary hypothesis for the evolutionary history of human bipedalism based on an analysis of Sumatran orangutan positional behaviour and locomotion. The researchers observed that hand-assisted bipedality gave orangutans access to multiple slender, flexible supports that could not otherwise be used and that climbing orangutans adjusted to the flexibility of branches by increasing knee and hip extension just as humans do when running on a springy surface. Their study suggested that hand-assisted arboreal bipedality and upright posture provided a selective advantage by providing the greatest safety when reaching for food with one hand and in crossing from the branches of one tree to another to reach additional food resources. It also hypothesized that hand-assisted bipedality was the most likely evolutionary precursor to straight-limbed human walking. Thus, according to this decidedly unconventional scenario, human bipedalism was an evolutionary retention from a common great ape ancestor rather than a hominin innovation, whereas the quadrupedal knuckle-walking exhibited by chimpanzees and gorillas was an evolutionarily derived mode of locomotion in response to the fragmentation of Miocene forest canopies.

In contrast, an American research team adopted the conventional assumption that the last common ancestor between apes and hominins was a quadrupedal knuckle walker, and they used a treadmill to test the energy efficiency of human bipedalism in comparison with chimpanzee quadrupedalism and bipedalism. Consistent with the long-standing hypothesis that bipedalism evolved to reduce locomotor energy costs, the researchers found that human walking was approximately 75% less costly in terms of oxygen consumption than either quadrupedal or bipedal walking in chimpanzees. Although the energy costs for the two forms of chimpanzee locomotion did not differ when the chimpanzees were analyzed as a group, four of the five chimpanzees in the study did exhibit statistically significant differences. For three of the four, quadrupedal locomotion was less costly; however, for one—a 33-year-old female—bipedalism was less costly than quadrupedalism. This finding was both unexpected and theoretically important. In comparison with her fellow subjects, the 33-year-old female presented a longer foot-ground contact time for each step, and her knee and hip flexion were relatively similar during both kinds of locomotion. In an evolutionary context, the authors speculated that variation in hind-limb extension, hind-limb length, foot-ground contact time, and step length among individuals in the last common ancestral population of the hominin and chimpanzee lineages could have provided the critical selection pressure for the development of the highly efficient bipedalism seen in more recent members of the genus Homo.

Extensive fossil evidence pertaining to bipedalism in early members of the genus Homo was also recently uncovered. An international research team reported newly excavated postcranial material (consisting of 32 bones) dating to 1.77 million years ago from Dmanisi (Georgia). The remains contained a partial skeleton of an adolescent and bones from three adults, including the first complete fossil hominin tibia, which was part of the most complete lower limb of any early Homo individual. The postcranial anatomy showed a surprising combination of primitive features (such as small body size and low degree of torsion of the humerus) and derived traits (such as modern humanlike body proportions and lower-limb morphology). Long legs, a forward-pointing big toe, and the presence of both transverse and longitudinal foot arches indicated that biomechanical efficiency for long-distance walking and energy expenditure for running would have been equivalent to that exhibited by modern humans. The length of the legs, similar to that of modern humans, probably reflected selection for locomotor efficiency in Homo, since energy expenditure for locomotion is inversely proportional to leg length in bipeds.

A Japanese-Ethiopian research team discovered nine gorilla-like teeth (one canine and eight molars) from deposits in the Afar Rift of Ethiopia. Dated at 10 million–10.5 million years old, the teeth represented at least three individuals from the newly defined extinct ape species, Chororapithecus abyssinicus. The large molars were specialized both for shredding fibrous vegetation and for chewing hard, abrasive food items. The authors proposed that Chororapithecus might have been a basal member of the gorilla clade or, alternatively, a large ape whose dental adaptations were convergent with those of modern gorillas. The protogorilla hypothesis, if correct, would push back the date for the gorilla species split to between 10.5 million and 12 million years ago, at least 2 million years earlier than indicated by recent genetic-based dates. Because no African ape fossils dated between 7 million and 12 million years ago had previously been found (with the exception of the 9.5 million-year-old Samburupithecus from Kenya), some paleoanthropologists speculated that after apes first evolved in Africa over 20 million years ago, they migrated to Eurasia and eventually returned to Africa, where they gave rise to the gorilla, chimpanzee, and hominin clades. The new dental data, however, effectively negated the need for this postulated Eurasian sojourn for the ancestors of modern African apes.

Anthropology and ArchaeologySimon Maina—AFP/Getty ImagesAn international research team described two African fossil hominin specimens from the Koobi Fora formation near Lake Turkana at Ileret, Kenya, that produced an unexpected chronology for the early members of the genus Homo. One specimen was a H. erectus calvaria (skullcap). It exhibited features of both Asian and African H. erectus, which thereby caused some paleoanthropologists to question whether the African specimens should continue to be placed in the separate taxon H. ergaster. The estimated age of the calvaria was 1.55 million years, and the estimated cranial capacity was only 691 cu cm (42.2 cu in), the smallest known adult cranial vault attributed to H. erectus. In overall appearance it most resembled the calvaria of an earlier Dmanisi juvenile and of a later specimen from Sambungmacan, Indon. The extremely small cranial dimensions of the new specimen indicated that H. erectus and H. habilis actually overlapped in size and that H. erectus might have displayed marked sexual dimorphism (given that the new specimen was female). The other described specimen was a H. habilis partial right maxilla that was dated at 1,440,000 years—a full 200,000 years later than any other H. habilis specimen. This date carried two extremely important evolutionary implications. First, the two species both lived in the Lake Turkana basin and overlapped chronologically for about 500,000 years. Second, H. habilis was unlikely to be directly ancestral to H. erectus through anagenesis (that is, a linear succession without branching), in contrast to numerous published phylogenies of hominins.

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